the cure – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I know, I know, the number of people on the planet who were hoping to find out my opinion on this album is approximately zero. That includes my wife. No one needs this review. You’re getting it anyway.

I just looked, and I’ve talked at least briefly about all three (yes, three; she released a kickass live album last year) of Rodrigo’s previous albums in this space. I owe the fact that I pay attention to Olivia Rodrigo at all to the fact that I’m a teacher; I never wrote the entire post and at this point it’s irrelevant, but her first album creeped me out on a deep and fundamental level as someone who is supposed to be an advocate for kids, and I never said a whole bunch of things about the people responsible for her career when she was a minor because I know how the internet works and they would be interpreted as me talking shit about her. And then Guts came out and bad idea right? was a world-class banger and a lot of the trepidation I had went away; it was clear pretty quick that the no-longer-quite-a-kid had more maturity and control over her own music than I’d been giving her credit for, and if the adults had been steering her wrong as I’d thought, she’d either gotten new adults or started ignoring the old ones.

All that said, I can boil the “review” part of this down to a single sentence if I want to: the last time an album has dominated my listening time as thoroughly as yspsfagsil was Dark Matter, Pearl Jam’s most recent album. That should be enough for anyone who has paid attention to my opinions on, well, anything; Pearl Jam is my favorite band of all time and at this point in my life is not going to be dethroned. This thing came out on June 12 and I’ve probably listened to it at least twenty times all the way through since then. I’m not sure there’s a song on here that I like as much as bad idea right? but the duet with Robert Smith, what’s wrong with me, is her best song.(*) drop dead, stupid song and maggots for brains are great tracks. Hell, I’d say the first five tracks on the album– those three, plus honeybee and u + me = <3 (**) are as good an opening five as any other album I can think of. I don’t love less, I suppose– in general the higher-energy songs rank higher in my esteem, and less is all high-register and piano; I kind of want to know what Billie Eilish would do with it– but there are no weak songs on here, and the most amazing thing is Rodrigo released a pop album in 2026 and the shortest song is still over three minutes long. I have grown so tired of music clearly written for TikTok. There’s none of that.

I genuinely can’t wait to see where Rodrigo’s career goes in the future. I started that sentence off saying “in twenty years” and then remembered I’m turning fifty this weekend. Let’s just say the future and go with that. Either way, this kid’s the real thing and if you have any interest in pop music at all and you haven’t at least streamed this yet, get on that.

(*) Olivia Rodrigo being singlehandedly responsible for making The Cure relevant to an entirely new generation was not something I was expecting of her during the Sour years, and I love it. Recall that The Cure’s latest album was also unexpectedly fantastic.

(**) yes, she literally says “you plus me equals a heart” in the refrain.

Unknown Today was the following: 1) A Friday; 2) Valentine’s Day; 3) A dress-down day; 4) a full moon; 5) the day before a three-day weekend. Today had no right to be anything other than a god damn disaster. And yet it was the second of two uncommonly good days. A few highlights of the last 48 hours and a few other random things that I feel like talking about:

First and foremost: There will be no gay marriage ban on Indiana’s ballot this fall. While, unfortunately, this isn’t as big of a deal as actual marriage equality, it basically means that the gay marriage ban is dead, because even if the bigots behind it keep bringing it up it now can’t be on the ballot before 2016 due to Indiana’s nicely complicated constitutional amendment laws. “Can’t be on the ballot before 2016” is a nice way of saying “will never, ever be on the ballot” at this point. Marriage equality advocates have won; this debate is over, it’s just that the dinosaur is taking a while to die. If fucking Indiana can’t pass a gay marriage ban anymore, it’s over. Judges nationwide are starting to wake up to the fact that “Eew! Icky” and “But JEEEEEZUS!” aren’t actually legal arguments, and that once you lay those aside there is nothing left. By 2016 this is a dead issue.
Somewhat less important but still way awesome: De La Soul is celebrating the 25th anniversary (jesusold) of Three Feet High and Rising by making their entire record catalog available for free on their website. The catch: you’ve got until, like, tomorrow afternoon sometime. Go forth and download.
Yesterday was my wife’s birthday, so we got to go out with a couple of friends for dinner, which was nice. We didn’t make it into our first choice restaurant (a bizarre spike in business that had the normally bitchy owner incredibly apologetic kept us from getting a table) but we were fed well at our second choice so no worries. We’ve kinda ignored Valentine’s Day because our 6th anniversary (damn) is in two weeks.
On the other hand, wife’s birthday means I got to watch the boy eat cake tonight. Which is always fun.
I stayed after school a bit today to watch a wrestling meet. I like watching middle school wrestling; I like watching amateur wrestling in general and unlike virtually every middle school sport you don’t get the occasional burst of cringeworthy incompetence that has you trying your damnedest not to laugh at your students behind a hand. Basketball in particular is prone to this. We won big, too, against our biggest local rival, which is awesome.
I commented to someone this morning that Jihad had had a decent week in my class (only two fifteen-minute ISS timeouts) and that he was dangerously close to making it through an entire week of school without being suspended, which would be the first time all year. I almost complimented the kid. He was in the office by lunchtime (I had nothing to do with it) and was suspended for five days. I know why but I’m not going to go into it here. This and the next item don’t count as good news and kinda spoil the tone of the rest of the piece a bit but the musical number at the end will make up for it.
We also busted a kid today for snorting vicodin in the restroom– five pills!– and put another one up for expulsion for bringing a BB gun and a knife to school. That last one was sort of my fault; the kid told me that he’d gotten punched at the bus stop after school yesterday (right thing to do!) but neglected to mention that he had brought weapons to defend himself in the future (wrong thing to do!). I let the office know about the fight and apparently he told them about the BB gun and the knife. Sigh.
Good school news: The blind kid is not nearly as blind as I’d been led to believe although he is extremely nearsighted, and while I’m still not completely up to speed in terms of providing him with the accommodations he needs to succeed it’s not going to be as onerous as I’d initially thought. It hit me today that this means I have a kid with major vision issues and a kid with major hearing issues in the same classroom.
More good school news: I’ve gotten two days of consistent paying attention/doing work/in school for a reason type behavior out of both of my most consistent low-IQ-but-also-legitimately-insanely-lazy kids. One of them actually volunteered to do work at the board today! It’s normally like pulling teeth to get either of these kids to do anything at all so seeing consistent compliance and even the occasional right answer once in a while has been awesome.
I’ve got the DC trip ironed out. Bad news: no Monticello; we just can’t make the scheduling work to a degree that I’m comfortable with. Good news: we get to go to the national zoo! ZOOOOOOOOOO!!! I think my tour director was legitimately startled by the vehemence of my positive response when she mentioned this was a possible replacement. I love zoos, and I’ve never been to the National Zoo before. Woohoo! The trip is in six weeks. Getting excited.
Speaking of things that are soon… one week until I find out about the grant. Still keeping my fingers crossed.
The good thing about it being both Friday and Valentine’s Day: I have divine sanction to listen to this song over and over again:

Three day weekend, so I’m planning on spending tomorrow alternately grading and writing; expect a thousand blog posts and hopefully a few thousand words of fiction, which you probably won’t see here.

How’re y’all?